This report is focused around Lost and Found data using the intakes and outcomes data received for 2021. Its goal is to reflect everything we could learn about L&F from the available data, make sure the numbers we see make sense, and highlight things that would be useful to show but some/all data required for them are missing.

Date range: 2021-01-01 to 2021-10-31

Report Structure

  1. KPIs: data points that indicate how good the shelter is doing on on L&F. They have numeric goals associated with them.
  2. Supporting data: data points that aren’t a goal themselves but serve as a proxy for improving a goal. For example, the method of RTH is not a performance indicator, but it helps identifying how RTHs take place. The number of strays found per ZIP code is not a metric to improve, but it shows where most strays are coming from to guide resource allocation.
  3. Data notes: the state of the data received from the shelter.
  4. Extra metrics: some ideas for additional L&F metrics and the data points they require.

Scroll down or use the table of contents on the left to navigate throughout the document. Most sections contain multiple tabs showing different facets of a data type. Most plots are interactive, meaning they include tooltips and allow hiding and showing parts and zooming in and out. If something went wrong, look for the house icon in the top right corner of each figure to reset.

KPIs

Yearly RTH Rates by Species

This section provides an overview of the RTH rate per year divided by species. We only included 2021 data here because we had it in the most detailed form, and we can extend any of these to previous years as relevant.

Overall RTH Rate

This table covers all strays and RTHs. Animals younger than 4 weeks are excluded from stray and RTH calculations. RTH rates shown below are the number of strays with RTO outcome out of all strays.

When we go over this, let’s make sure we calculate the rate the same way you do, so we would want to make sure what we see makes sense. If these numbers are right, they are lower than the national and HASS averages, which are at 30% RTH rate (for dogs). When we looked at past years, we did note this was slighly higher than 2019 and 2020 that had 7-10% return rates for strays.

Species Year Strays RTH_Count RTH_Rate
Cat 2021 526 8 0.02
Dog 2021 2396 274 0.11
Horse 2021 2 2 1.00
Pig 2021 1 1 1.00

Field RTH Rate

This one only counts animals who came in as strays from the field, which is anything that has ‘ACO’ in the intake subtype, which is primarily ACO Pickup / Drop Off (there are 73 animals with ACO Drop Off / Ear Tipped also included). Normally, we would then split these by RTH method between RTO in the field and in the shelter, but here we will just look at the RTH rate as a whole since we did not identify a way to distinguish those yet.

The rate is pretty similar to the overall one, suggesting animals coming from the field or by the public are equally likely to be returned home.

Species Year Strays RTH_Count RTH_Rate
Cat 2021 64 2 0.03
Dog 2021 789 87 0.11

Shelter RTH Rate

This shows the numbers only for strays that were public drop offs. We can see that the rate is similar to the field and overall rates.

Species Year Strays RTH_Count RTH_Rate
Cat 2021 462 6 0.01
Dog 2021 1607 187 0.12
Horse 2021 2 2 1.00
Pig 2021 1 1 1.00

RTH Over Time

These three time series show the RTH rate per month, to show whether there were times with particularly high or low rates as well as the overall trajectory. These figures show only dogs information because there were only 8 RTH cats in 2021.

It seems like the rate has been slowly decreasing throughout the year with peaks in January-February and June.

Overall RTH

Field RTH

This is the same figure, but only counting field strays (again, anything marked as ACO pick up). Looks pretty similar to the overall trend.

Shelter RTH

This figure only counts strays who were public drop offs. Here the peak in the beginning of the year seems more pronounced, and the drop occurring around April and remaining consistent since.

Stray Intakes

This section shows the number of stray intakes over time, as well as the breakdown of strays by field/shelter intake.

Stray Intakes by Month

Dog numbers are pretty steady, suggesting that the differences in RTH rates between months are not a result of differences in intake volume.

Stray Intake Subtypes

62% of animals come from ACO drop offs, 26% from the public, and the rest are DOA or born in care.

Length of Stay Differences - RTH v. Other Outcomes

The average difference in length of stay (in days) between strays with RTH outcomes and all other strays is shown in the table below – roughly 16 days for dogs and 9 for cats when looking at the average.

That means that every successful RTH saves 16 days of care on average at Fresno Humane, and field RTH would save an extra day or two on average for RTH from the shelter. This could translate to pretty significant cost savings at scale – assuming a daily cost of care of 20$, if the RTH rate for dogs were 25% (reuniting an extra 325 dogs this year), it would have saved Fresno Humane about $1.0410^{5} in costs of care (this is a fairly simple calculation, but it gets at the magnitude of the potential benefits).

Species Outcome Count Average_Length_Of_Stay
Cat Other Outcomes 166 15.93 days
Cat RTO 8 7.75 days
Dog Other Outcomes 338 18.67 days
Dog RTO 274 2.33 days

Supporting Data

Stray Intake and RTH By Found Location

The following maps show stray intake and RTH rate by Census tracts to highlight geographical patterns. The first and second tab are similar to previous metrics; the third tab, RTH Gap, shows the number of strays who were not returned home per census tract.

The data in this section includes stray dogs for which found addresses were present. There were 3871 animals with intake type of strays, but that includes some DOA and Born in Care animals. For simplicitly, the two major subtypes were examined: Field pickup and Public Drop Off, including 3394 animals in total. 39 Animals with the shelter’s address (and anything on its street) were excluded, as well as 32 with a ‘24/7 drop box’ address. Several additional addresses that include intersections with highways (41, 188, 99) were excluded because the geocoding engine failed to use the intersection listed and always opted for a generic location on the highway.

After this filtering, the data below (number of strays, rate of RTH, RTH gap) is shown for 2909 strays of which 259 were RTH.

Stray Intake

RTH Rate

RTH Gap

This combines the other two tabs to highlight where most additional RTH potential exists.

Top 10 Found Locations

Here’s a sneak peak into the top 10 found locations plotted above, to make sure they make sense to you.

Found.Location Count
Herndon and Russell 93706 California 33
Davis and Fruit 93706 California 27
Kamm and Walnut 93609 California 17
Church and Floyd 93706 California 15
N Lake Ave and W Ashlan Ave 93630 California 15
Hayes and Belmont 93723 California 13
Brawley Ave and Lincoln Ave 93706 California 12
Wakefield Ave and Jefferson Ave 93706 California 12
Hedges and Thesta 93703 California 11
N Lassen Ave and W Gettysburg Ave 93630 California 11

Census Data

This map shows different demogrpahic information for Fresno County.

Distances Traveled by Lost Dogs

This section examines animals that had an RTH outcome andn both a found location and an outcome address listed to find out how far away do dogs go from home when they get lost (and are found).

Across the data, there were 2944 strays with workable intake addresses (ploted above). Out of those, only 259 had an RTH outcome, of which 7 dogs had unusable outcome addresses. For each dog, the listed intake address and owner addresses were geocoded (using Google’s geolocation service), and then the distance between the two points was calculated. Some addresses were geocoded incorrectly and were removed, as were dogs with a distance of more than 50 miles between the two points, which were few. Some of these can be corrected if needed. This filtering left a total of 243 dogs.

The distribution of distances is shown in the following figure.

Of these 243 dogs, 44% were found less than a mile away from home, and 72% were within 1-5 miles from home. These are slightly higher numbers than other communities we’ve looked at (the closest by was Madera County which had 51% of animals within a mile) 20% of all animals were found more than 5 miles away. Also, the number of dogs examined (243) is relatively small, so looking at more years might produce a more robust estimate.

Distance.Category Num.Animals Ratio
5+ Miles 65 27.8%
1-5 Miles 68 29.1%
More than a Block, Less than 1 Mile 88 37.6%
Up to a Block 13 5.6%

Finally, we also looked at whether these distances are different based on the Jurisdiction – Fresno compared to all others. The table below shows that for Fresno, exactly 50% of animals were found within 1 mile from home, whereas for other jurisdictions it was only 30%.

Distance.Category Fresno Others
5+ Miles 22.8% 37%
1-5 Miles 27.2% 32.1%
More than a Block, Less than 1 Mile 43.2% 27.2%
Up to a Block 6.8% 3.7%

As another way of capturing this difference, the following table also shows the number of dogs and their average and median distances traveled when dividing them into Fresno/Other jurisdictions. The averages are pretty high in both cases because of a few outliers who went far away from home, but the average outside Fresno is still about twice as big. The median is a better indicator in this case because it is less sensitive to these few outliers, and it is more than double than Fresno’s 1 mile distance.

Jurisdiction Count Average.Distance Median.Distance
Fresno 162 3.79 1.07
Others 81 6.77 2.69

Data Notes

  1. 249 animals did not have a ZIP code listed.

  2. Out of all strays in 2021, only 39 had a found location of the shelter address, which is a reasonable percentage, 32 had the ‘24/7 box’ value, and 157 had to be removed because they did not list an intersection or a street number (but just a street name, for example).

  3. Intake subtype had several values that were in very unfrequent use as you could see in the figure above.

  4. Outcome subtype – no difference between field/shelter returns.

Extra Metrics

Other things we could show if we had the data for it:

  1. Exact distances traveled by lost dogs from home for more recent years.
  2. Prevalence of microchips across town (for example, are there areas from which more animals come in without chips?) and the RTH rates for animals found with/without chips, if there is a field indicating microchip scan results upon intake.
  3. Reclaim fees (could be a yes/no to track fee waiving).
  4. Number of public found reports and successful RTH by the public (if this data is accessible to the shelter).

Thanks for reading through, and we’re looking forward to talking through it and thinking about more ways to make this data useful for you.